WoW Down to 8.3 Million Subscribers
Activision Blizzard's press release states that World of Warcraft is down to 8.3 million subscribers. This is a loss of 1.3 million, down from 9.6 million last quarter. Most of the loss came from the East once again.

Blizzard expects to have less subscribers at the end of the year than they do today.

Most of the decline in subscribers came from China.

There has been less engagement by casual players.

Blizzard is going to work on improving the experience for returning players.

Blizzard All Stars and Titan will not be released in 2013 according to the slide below.

Heart of the Swarm was the #1 PC game of the quarter, selling 1.1 million copies in two days.

There has been increased competition with F2P games in Asia.

Players consume content faster and subscribe and unsubscribe as new content is added.

Sorry, but's all over for World of Warcraft. In 6 month's time one of the greatest MMORPGs to ever existed will be no more. Who killed it? The whining complaining casual fanbase that took a legendary game built on Warcraft 3 and proceeded to completely rape it over for the sake of their own egos. You just had to have your free epics, didn't you? You just had to make the game easier to 'see all the content,' didn't you? You had to go to forums to complain every single time you died to smallest inconvenience, didn't you? You and your kind disgusts me. The end is coming and you can't stop it.

1 hour long queues for LFR.
1 hour wasted killing bosses and all you get is bag of gold. *rinse - repeat next week same results*
Everything having a horrible drop rate... SPecially mounts.

And to fix the subs.. Maybe create Vanilla/BC servers? That would bring people back.

Maybe its just the time when I log in (after 10pm in the evening), but normally experience 1-10min lfr queues and 1-4 min bg queues. 1-10 second 2v2 queues, <1min 3v3 q's. Durotar is always packed, levelling area's are always busy. The world is buzzing.

Rerolling is a very poor option with the state of the game now. If you decide to up and leave that class you have been toiling away with for 7 years, you lose further advancement towards reputation achievements and have to start from scratch with "fun" secondary professions irregardless of the fact the class no longer suits you is because of Blizzard's design decisions. Account wide reputation and secondary professions could really help in people feeling too stuck to their class and getting burnt out as a result.

And that's weird, how come it suddenly became unappealing to roll a new 90? When did we start loathing character progression like reputation? Thanks LK/Cata/Obama!

Sorry, but's all over for World of Warcraft. In 6 month's time one of the greatest MMORPGs to ever existed will be no more. Who killed it? The whining complaining casual fanbase that took a legendary game built on Warcraft 3 and proceeded to completely rape it over for the sake of their own egos. You just had to have your free epics, didn't you? You just had to make the game easier to 'see all the content,' didn't you? You had to go to forums to complain every single time you died to smallest inconvenience, didn't you? You and your kind disgusts me. The end is coming and you can't stop it.

*giggle*

Yeah, screw the majority. The game should've stopped development in BC. Only people able to reach Sunwell should be allowed to enjoy the game.
../.,

It's hilarious to read the posts from those who are being shaudenfraude over this.

"Game is being dumbed down for casuals!" (you mean, not just catering to raiders)
"Too much rep grinds and stuff!" (you mean, like the game used to have)

Tell me how farming/attuning for weeks to kill 1-mechanic bosses in Classic/BC made the game more appealing to more people then?

The game isn't being dumbed down. Raids are now far more complex than they used to be to the point where trying to introduce new players to the content can be a real struggle for smaller 10 man guilds. Personally, I would prefer to see ToT normal just a smidgeon easier with a more noticeable difficulty curve rather than hitting brick walls constantly, losing players that don't have the patience and then having to re-recruit and start back close to square one.

As someone who has 58 exalted factions on their ex-main before the inclusion of anything from MoP (i.e. rep grinds are my thing), the issue isn't that there are too many reputation factions now but rather that they are all incredibly gated. Being able to do dailies for reputation and then jump into a dungeon to gain more (at a pace you are happy with) was wonderful but there is no such feeling with MoP. The gated aspects were fine when it was one or two factions - think Ogri'la and Netherwing or perhaps Kalu'ak and the Scholazar faction of your choice - coupled with factions that could be completed much quicker by jumping into a dungeon (or donning a tabard). When it is applied to every single faction, the grind is no longer masked or perceived to only apply to one or two factions and everything begins to feel like a huge and insurmountable chore.

The knock-on effect of this, which Blizzard hasn't considered at all, is that the story makes no sense to a player who hits 90 during 5.1 or 5.2. I was chatting with an angry Jaina and going through the Isle of Thunder before even finding out about the events that went down in 5.1. That is poor story telling and it arises purely because Blizzard feel their incredibly gated approach to reputation is correct.

Sorry, but's all over for World of Warcraft. In 6 month's time one of the greatest MMORPGs to ever existed will be no more. Who killed it? The whining complaining casual fanbase that took a legendary game built on Warcraft 3 and proceeded to completely rape it over for the sake of their own egos. You just had to have your free epics, didn't you? You just had to make the game easier to 'see all the content,' didn't you? You had to go to forums to complain every single time you died to smallest inconvenience, didn't you? You and your kind disgusts me. The end is coming and you can't stop it.

And that's weird, how come it suddenly became unappealing to roll a new 90? When did we start loathing character progression like reputation? Thanks LK/Cata/Obama!

New reputation factions? Sure. That is fun. Being told "So you no longer like X, well, you need to start over with your work towards "The Beloved" if you want to play Y. And don't even think about getting credit for your Shen'dralar or Zandalari reputation! That is locked to X. Enjoy!" isn't fun.

We can talk about character progression all we want. Character progression (to me) is the gear adorning my Gnome's shoulders and wrapped around her waist. It is learning the correct rotations and responses. I am furthering my character with this. Gaining reputations? That is something that the player has done; the player has slogged through Wintersaber Trainers over three months, killed more than 40,000 pirates and solved much of Booty Bay's crime problems (before reintroducing them in a mass slaughter of guards) and it would be lovely if, like the raid meta-achievements, or pets, or mounts, it was realized as such.

I disagree with that. No flying mounts and no rep tabards are improvement, not step backwards.

With flying mounts sense of danger is gone, resulting in most boring content ever and people would quit faster than they are quitting now.

I tell you what is boring. being dismounted every 100 yards by random mobs you dont wanna fight. Accidentaly missteping and falling down 5 yards, but having to take another 40 seconds to run around huge cliff just to get back. Constantly bumping into random textures. Thats the stuff that is boring and is byproduct of no flyers. Sense of danger? hah, name me 5 servers, where H/A ratio is actually somewhat balanced? Most realms have this "sense of danger" only for the minority, in our case Alliance for example. I am horde and I was attacked on the Isle ONCE and that was because I went afk during doing pvp dailys in Aliance base

While reputation via dailies is a horrible solution, tabards is even worse solution because it makes reputations meaningless. There should be way to get reputation other than dailies, but not with tabards. Selecting rep for 1 dungeon run per day works great. It wouldn't be an issue at all if valor gear wasn't tied to reputations, which I think it the biggest mistake with new rep grinds.

Tabards themselves werent the problem, I suggested in beta they limit the amount of rep you can get via tabard per day. Oh look, they did exactly that, giving us limited rep per day via dungeons. Except back in the day, it was being called Championing the faction by wearing tabard, now its called Championing the faction via UI click.

But really, reps are so pathetically slow I would rather farm Zandalaris, get hefty profit from bags, get mounts and have enough marks to bring several alts to exalted in a couple of seconds for the imporant factions (lotus and klaxxi, free 489s) rather than slowly grind dailys or do dungeon every day next couple of weeks

And the only reason casuals enjoyed this was because it was new, Warcraft and pretty much uncontested on the market.

The looks on people's faces if they just flat out reverted to the "successful" recipe of BC would be hilarious.

Doesn't matter though, the game is too old to stay at 10+ million. It's simple logic.
Too bad that logic goes unnoticed by "haters" because we haven't been having another 6 years of "CASUALS SHOULD ONLY GET RARE ITEMS"

With TOT being released in Q1 - didnt expect such a huge drop in subs. Well the game is aging and people are losing interest in it on their own as well.
Can be many different reasons. Lets say 800k was in East and 500k was in West, still majority is East :P.

I think in general people are spreading over different MMOs and games in general. Besides its finally warm and summer on its way - can only expect numbers to continue to drop.

@MasterHamster: They kinda tried it at start of Cata and what happened? Very fast super nerfs all over the place.

What I hate most about these discussions is that everyone thinks their personal problem with the game is the reason the subscribers are down.

I can tell you it very likely is not.

Quoting myself from another thread:

Doesn't take a genius to predict sub changes for a game that's 8 years old.

Too bad an inevitable stage in any popular products popularity is used as a way of strengthening negative opinion that can be as diverse as the playerbase.
You see it in every damn thread as subs have gone down. "It was due to x! -No it was due to y! -Guys, it was obviously z. -You're all wrong, it's because of Hello Kitty."

Is Apple as a company failing because the iPhone isn't the behemoth it once was? When Samsung at some point will stop increasing in the global market, are the Galaxy smartphones dying?

So sick and tired of this mentality that WoW subs has to go up by half a million every quarter, or else it's obviously doing something wrong. The biggest factor in WoWs declining subs is its age. That's it. Cliché. Hard to prove. Yet that's simply it. How many new players have you met recently? How large can the potential "new player" base be after this long? Up until Cataclysm, the game was still new enough (not to mention unchallenged by other MMOs) to attract way more new players than players quitting. Eventually those will equalize, then players quitting the game will be higher than the new players coming in.

And I'm certain there are people reading this post thinking things like "PvP is an unbalanced mess, that's why!" or "I don't like ToT/the latest raid, obviously no one else does." or even "I STILL HAVE TO DO DAILIES/MONOTONOUS TASKS NOW AND THEN?!"

And the only reason casuals enjoyed this was because it was new, Warcraft and pretty much uncontested on the market.

The looks on people's faces if they just flat out reverted to the "successful" recipe of BC would be hilarious.

Doesn't matter though, the game is too old to stay at 10+ million. It's simple logic.
Too bad that logic goes unnoticed by "haters" because we haven't been having another 6 years of "CASUALS SHOULD ONLY GET RARE ITEMS"

And if that was the case, the game would actually be dead by now.

They have been focusing on casuals ever since they launched the super easy Wrath dungeons and the super easy Naxx. The game has been in decline since.

Originally Posted by MasterHamster

Quoting myself from another thread:

Call of Duty breaks records with every new release, because they know their demographic.

An MMO that shrinks is a dead MMO. People play MMOs mostly because they want to feel part of a big growing world and community. An MMO in which you only see friend after friend leave every week is an MMO that will make you feel depressed and will make everything you're doing in it feel empty.